Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @07:57PM
from the we're-not-gonna-take-it dept.

c0lo writes "The editor-in-chief and entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration announced their resignation last week, citing 'a crisis of conscience about publishing in a journal that was not open access' in the days after the death of Aaron Swartz. The board had worked with publisher Taylor & Francis on an open-access compromise in the months since, which would allow the journal to release articles without paywall, but Taylor & Francis' final terms asked contributors to pay $2,995 for each open-access article. As more and more contributors began to object, the board ultimately found the terms unworkable. The journal's editor-in-chief said 'After much discussion, the only alternative presented by Taylor & Francis tied a less restrictive license to a $2995 per article fee to be paid by the author. As you know, this is not a viable licensing option for authors from the LIS community who are generally not conducting research under large grants.'"

Unless you have a stable funding model... I suspect they'll be working at jobs where they can feed their families and keep a roof over their head.

Admire them for what they did, but don't fool yourself into believing that money doesn't matter to real people in the real world.

It's also good to not fool yourself into thinking you know more than shit about what your talking about.Or as Lincoln put it, "when in a room full of people who think you are an idiot, it's better to keep quiet then open your mouth and remove any doubt."

In terms opf the p[resent argument, if the editors of the journal work as an overwhelming majority of editors of academic journals ( and they might not, I didn't even know that there were active library science researchers ), then they weren't getting paid

So, here's the other reason to force people to pay to submit to the journal. This weeds out the cranks and trolls...

While this seems reasonable, I would like to point out that:

1) Cranks and trolls are not a problem in academic publishing, it never was a problem, and it isn't expected to be a problem in the future.

2) Cranks and Trolls are well filtered by other aspects of the system. Few cranks and trolls have PHDs, teach at uni, or are working under a grant. Those that manage to overcome these barriers and are easily dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

3) By switching to a "pay to publish" model, your filter is targeting cash-poor researchers, not cranks. Corporations could afford to have their studies published, which would skew overall trends. Drug companies, tobacco companies, and oil companies would have a competitive edge over a uni or grant researcher.

Once we accept that getting rid of the trolls has value to the author, the question is...

4) You are an astroturfer - a paid shill trying to sway the collective opinion by hand-waving and solipsism.

Peer review is supposed to weed out the cranks and trolls. Is it really so hard to READ anymore? I hate Youtube only because of the generation of video-dependent people that have stemmed from it. Most people would rather watch 20 video tutorials over the course of two days than spend 2 hours to read a complex document. I can only hope future scientists are immune to it.

Unfortunately, it sometimes doesn't work. Ask Alan Sokal (troll), Andrew Wakefield (liar and murderer by proxy), Diederik Stapel (liar), Jan Hendrik Schön (liar) or the other trolls, pranksters and liars that got through peer review without so much as a raised eyebrow from the reviewers or the editors.

Science is a human endeavor, and prone to all the failings that humans possess. Stuff does fall through the cracks because it isn't perfect. It just happens to be the best system we've got that, in general and over the course of years, stumbles along towards progress. If you have a better alternative, please don't keep it a secret.

I'll also note that all the counterexamples you list were, eventually, f

Science is a human endeavor, and prone to all the failings that humans possess. Stuff does fall through the cracks because it isn't perfect. It just happens to be the best system we've got that, in general and over the course of years, stumbles along towards progress.

Noted and agreed.

If you have a better alternative, please don't keep it a secret.

Passive-aggressive much?

I'll also note that all the counterexamples you list were, eventually, found out through the scientific process and repudiated by the

While I agree that increasing transaction costs reduces the overall number of submissions, its not as if there is a significant problem with spurious entries to begin with. That type of disincentive is most effective in preventing DoS-like problems, and the charge doesn't need to be large. Imagine what a $0.01 charge to place/cancel an offer would do to high frequencey trading. What you propose is more along the lines of regulatory capture, creating the type of barrier to entry we collectively like to co

So, here's the other reason to force people to pay to submit to the journal. This weeds out the cranks and trolls.

No, it weeds out the poor cranks. And researchers, say in climate change, or pharmaceuticals, or diet... who are friendly to corporations, would find the money easily enough. Leaving science that was inconvenient to business unpublished. Imagine how this would have affected research on the effects of smoking.

However, if another journal is able to keep out the trolls for $1K (and likely, they can, that's what editors are for), that's the end of that. The big problem the publishers are facing is that on one side readers are realizing that they really shouldn't have to pay for research they already funded through tax money, and on the other researchers are realizing that now that you no longer have to own a massive printing press to publish something, the publishers are asking for an awful lot of money.

Yeah, who could possibly afford something that requires all the resources of an email list or barely active online forum? Hopefully they figure out how to re-brand this as a military expense, where it can get the billions of dollars of funding needed.

The things is that there is mostly nothing to be paid. the editor-in-chief and the editorial board is not generally paid. The reviewers are not paid. Most readers access electronic versions and the paper version are almost never opened. So the actual cost is extremely low for the publisher. The only thing the publisher provide now a days is grammar check and spell check and text layouting. Anybody that worked in the field would tell you that mostly that part of the job is not properly done, especially text layouting. I often need multiple rounds with the publisher before I agree on their text layout.

So in brief they do not produce anything of value on the documentitself. They do print it but nobody cares. They do provide web access. But that could be done as the physicists do by publishing everything in arxiv first.

Printing is not "cheap" unless its done in house. Depending on the binding and the number of pages the costs may range between a few bucks and up. Let's say there isa modest run of 20,000 and you have a healthy up front cost which borders on an annual salary.

There are two things a publisher actually does:
1. "face" - sort-of poses as "uninterested/impartial 3rd party, between authors and reviewers"
2. "guarantees the permanence" of the published information - sort-of an archivist.

Both of them are minor and easy (cheaper) to replaceable: first is actually only a pose (the authors/reviewers live and die by their professional ethic), second: a contribution to the archive.org will be cheaper than paying a publisher.

The only thing the publisher provide now a days is grammar check and spell check

As a researcher who has read hundreds, possibly thousands of journal articles, I say bollocks. Maybe Nature Publishing Group journals do a thorough spelling and grammar check, but all the others (in the field of chemistry, materials science and nanotechnology at least) do not.

Anybody that worked in the field would tell you that mostly that part of the job is not properly done, especially text layouting.

So I thought the author wanted to emphasize layouting. I had (and still have) a gripe with poor orthography and grammar, that is so merrily left unadulterated in the final version of so many manuscripts.

As a researcher who has read hundreds, possibly thousands of journal articles, I say bollocks. Maybe Nature Publishing Group journals do a thorough spelling and grammar check, but all the others (in the field of chemistry, materials science and nanotechnology at least) do not.

Well it would be nice if there servers stayed up and provided the content for at least a few decades. Fast pipes and stable sites are not free or even almost free. Yes i would like cheaper page charges. But seriously, the 1-2k is nothing compared to just about anything else. Including salary's, computers, lab equipment, travel etc.

the authors are academics that are being paid from a grant or by their employer -- they're not being paid by the journal;

the authors typeset their paper themselves, using TeX or a word processor;

the reviewers are fellow academics, who are not paid by the journal (they're usually anonymous, so they don't even receive kudos for their work);

discussion happens mostly over e-mail, which is already paid for.

So what remains is the salary of the editor and some administrative overhead, which should not be too onerous for even a minor institution.

Publisher's roles nowadays:
1. Archiving - longer term storage of the articles; and
2. go-between authors and reviewers, so that the reviewers can be anonymous to the authors... (possible problems otherwise along the range of "reciprocal back scratching, who cares about science" or the "mortal foes forever, scientific truth be damned" extremes).

Both of them easy to replace nowadays (for an "online only, download and print when you want it on your own printer" type of journal).

You forgot "Go to conferences and trade shows and spend a lot to promote the brand."

At a recent huge research conference, I went to a bar. Didn't know it until I walked in, I was meeting some colleagues there, but it was open bar, paid for by a major journal for researchers to try to woo them into publishing there. I enjoyed the booze, which was paid for by the journal, which got paid from universities and researchers buying back research that they had done, which in turn was paid for (both parts) by grants, which was paid by the taxpayer.

I was a little sick the next day at that realization. Also the whiskey. And a cold, you'd think thousands of biologists would be better at keeping germs from spreading between themselves.

I never typeset my papers myself. Many Journals offer special templates for Word and Latex to use, but I never even look at them. I pay US$ 100,- per page on average and I refuse to do all the work a publisher has to do beside that. I never had any troubles with that.

The things that strikes me most about these discussions is the question of what we want our journals (and your articles) to be. Are we looking for a race to the cheapest possible publishing systems or are we looking to maintain an environment where there is true incentive to compete for business and continual improvement to the authoring/reading experience?

I'd like to see some evidence that publishing a journal requires each article to be costed at 2995 dollars (a suspicious looking figure to me).

I'm an academic. I get asked to peer review articles for free. We do it as part of our workload. I have colleagues who edit journals. They do this for free. I author articles: I do this within the costs of my project, the journal gets my article for free. Authors work for free, reviewers work for free, editors work for free. It's just the production and publicity team that get paid (the publishing house). We don't even expect them to roll the presses and produce paper versions these days, we are happy with web links to PDFs.

So we need to think hard about what the costs are in putting an online journal live onto the internet.

Why do academics continue to publish in closed journals? because generally they are still the high impact ones (with a very few exceptions). So I, and many other contract researchers like me, tend to publish in closed journals because these look better on the cv. Philosophical high ground is all well and good but when you've got a child to feed and a house to pay for you have to be pragmatic and keep in a job.

I can imagine this might change over the next 20 years or so as more and more folk start open access journals and they are gradually given greater impact ratings.

Personally I think we're going to see a few universities taking the lead with open access journals and this might break into the monopoly held by a small number of publishers right now. If you're doing it not-for-profit you can do it cheaper than a commercial publishing house that has to show profit to its shareholders.

Yes. Have journals be online, for example using free software for that purpose like Open Journal Systems [pkp.sfu.ca], and have faculty members run them as part of their job description. Some successful and long running journals already operate this way.

There certainly are ways to do that. But it would require the community to move away from them. As a recently hired assistant professor, my tenure will be evaluated partially based on my publication track in "good journals". So I will publish wherever my tenure commitee believe is good. Currently this happens to be where publishers are.

But some journals are starting to offer open-access publishing options, you just pay as the author. I can't remember which, but one journal I was looking at publishing required $2k to put your journal article on their website without a paywall.

At the time, I was skeptical that it would pay off, and published it regular-like. But since then, I've had a few researchers I didn't know e-mail me, asking for the PDF. It wasn't a journal article with a particularly broad audience, so I'm wondering if I reall

As someone previously pointed out, physicists have been coming close with arXiv ( and it's predecessors ) for 30 years.It's much cheaper and easier now, then it was back then.

The main thing you need is a bit of funding, but if the funding agencies were to reduce grants by 90% of what goes into paying for these journals ( publishing fees, library expenditures on journals, access fees to journal articles ) and give out grants ( from that 90%, after a few years I figure very little would be needed ) to people

I think for low-profile journals which are edited by active scientists, it shouldn't be a problem to move to something like arXiv overlay journals, which comes as close to free as you can get. High-profile journals like Nature and Science, however, are a completely different story. Here, you have full-time editors paid by the journals who actually have to do tricky tasks such as finding good referees who will not reject a paper on political grounds or promote a paper because it was written by one of their p

High-profile journals like Nature and Science, however, are a completely different story. Here, you have full-time editors paid by the journals who actually have to do tricky tasks such as finding good referees who will not reject a paper on political grounds...

Good one. ROFLMAO

Oh wait. You don't want referees rejecting papers on political grounds... IOW you don't want referees usurping an editors privilege I get it now.

There is. One publisher actually got mostly out of the publishing business and transformed itself into a digital repository/digital publishing vendor. While I realize this isn't exactly an open source solution, it does create a viable turnkey solution that fully supports the double-blind peer review process out of the box. I fully recognize that there are legitimate discussions to be had about Freedom and such, but I figure it's also worth mentioning that there are solutions out there that enable self-pu

The hard part when anyone can publish anything is finding something worth reading.

Just have a/. comment voting system where readers/writers can "vote" on the articles. Very quickly there will be a select group of readers providing valid ratings, so give them more mod points. The good articles will bubble up to the top having higher rating. The "prestige" factor will be in having a high rating on such a site. And the karma will improve!

More of a correlation between the science and the IT sophistication of the scientists.

I was there when arXiv was born. It started as a mailing list run by a woman physics grad student ( Joanne Cohn IIRC ) who sent TeX preprints from the UTexas staff to post-docs who had been grad students there. After a while other people sent their TeX preprints to her. Then it got too big for a mailing list. Way too big.So Paul Ginsparg wrote some software to manage it. Initially you sent ma preprint to a submission list

Why did they only make it $2995? Why didn't they make it $190,000 and a free ride in a helicopter to Disneyworld? Ask for the real money. On the other hand, they did come in under $3000, which the Ronco corporation knew was the key to selling lots of Ginsu knives. Only $19.95.

Um, it doesn't take a genius to see that you're not exactly making a great offer: "Our journal will publish your article into the public domain! Now fork out $3000 for the privilege!" I don't think board needed many reasons of conscience to resign. They were probably more like: "Hey, let's stop working for these idiots!"

This is actually a common things in academic journals. When I publish a paper, I have the "opportunity" of making the paper "open access" by paying some amount of money. It is a fairly standard practice.

It seems reasonable that a publisher would have to recover costs and make a profit. If they can not recover it from subscription the only other choice is to charge contributors. Publishers are not charities. According to this annual report [informa.com] Taylor & Francis' parent compant made a 27% profit in the Academic Information sector and 7% overall. Without that cash cow the company is not viable.

In the 1980s, the commercial scientific publishers discovered that they could keep raising their subscription rates at well above inflation, and university libraries would keep paying them. So not only did their profits soar, but their expectation for future revenue increases also soared. On the basis of this, the companies were rated as being very valuable and got bought out for very large sums. Now some suit somewhere has invested billions of dollars in such a company

This is actually a common things in academic journals. When I publish a paper, I have the "opportunity" of making the paper "open access" by paying some amount of money. It is a fairly standard practice.

Standard, yes. Fairly, not so much. Where does the word "thieves" best fit in here?--Maybe this hell is another planet's heaven. Heaven help them.

I'm dated but you could try Physical Review. or simply go to any science library and open the front page. It will be there somewhere in the instruction for articles submissions. Usually they are called page fees.

In our defense, we're generally not the ones paying for access fees. The universities are, which are using student tuition to. Granted, the universities do take a ridiculous chunk of the grants we work hard to bring in, and then they do little for us in return besides keep the lights on...

Not too mention, we have a tuition crisis, where tuition cost is exceeding it's benefit.

And it's akin to claiming that we only pay half of our Social Security tax, our employer pays the other half - which is all factored into the total cost of compensation for an employee. And means it's really coming out of our check in the end.

I would prefer to solve the problem of publishing research in an open, free, non-commercial environment, but don't know of one. I wonder, if it wouldn't be workable to self-publish on Amazon.com, which has the bandwidth, storage, and infrastructure to support the publishing of the research and associated reviews.

There is so much talk about how cost are minuscule and any reasonably sized institute could bear the load. If that was true then why has it not been done already? I am sure most institutes would love to get rid of the costs of journal subscriptions. Perhaps it is not as easy or low cost as some people think.

There is so much talk about how cost are minuscule and any reasonably sized institute could bear the load. If that was true then why has it not been done already? I am sure most institutes would love to get rid of the costs of journal subscriptions. Perhaps it is not as easy or low cost as some people think.

According to their FAQ, arXiv's operating costs for 2013-2017 are projected to average of $826,000 per year, including indirect expenses. Cornell (the hosting institution) kicks in about $75K/year. They also get $350K/year from the Simons Foundation***. Other schools/institutions kick in money based on a "shame" funding model (kind of like a museum suggested donation). arXiv publishes a list of the top 200 downloading institutions sorted by orginating I

OK. So we are starting to get somewhere.There are still a few facts needed, roughly how many grants are awarded to those universities?

How much money in those grants is set aside for cost of publishing and purchasing reference materials?

Using physics and arXiv as models, assume that 30% of topics (high-energy, general relativity, solid-state, etc ) are covered by arXiv and 50% ( the 30% are generally the most exciting and interesting areas, and also the most prolific ) of the physics papers produced in a y

ArXiv is an e-print archive. It does not appear that they do any peer reviews or editing. It would seem that hosting journals would be even more expensive. It look more and more like the "it's cheap enough for anyone to take over" crowd is way off.

Here's the way I imagine society works: Some among us produce food. Later, some start producing stuff (as in industry). Then we all notice we need knowledge to keep the economy going. So we set up higher education, and pay people (professors) so they can focus just on education, and leave the moneymaking to the rest of us.

So why is that that we have people still trying to make money off of education, when we're already paying for it anyway?!

When the taxpayers have already funded research, what's the justification for not having that research available to anybody and everybody?

I think it's because people who are working hard to learn or do research are more interested in that than in starting a new way in which they won't be screwed. I could start a journal which would be fair, I could work hard to get investors and raise the impact factor to respectable levels (or rather I could once I get to be respected in my field). But I won't, because that would be incredibly boring. Also because I would rather do science that will contribute more to society, but really it's about intere

I took a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathWorld to remind myself about how CRC press treated Eric W. Weisstein (creator of MathWorld). CRC press is a division of Taylor and Francis. Whenever I get a request to referee for a Taylor and Francis publication, I decline and point the editor at the MathWorld story.

I just read the Wikipedia article, and apparently the sticking point was "that the MathWorld content was to remain in print only". If that's the contract Weisstein signed, he could have known he would get into trouble. Don't get me wrong, the academic publishing business is very seriously broken in many ways, but if this is really just a breach of contract, Weisstein should've known better.

People could also stop responding to any and all APK posts, real or forged.

What we really need is a "tl;dr" rating so that this interminable tripe can be independently displayed pre-collapsed without censoring others who are merely -1. It's a pain to scroll past this stuff and all the moreso since it's double-spaced, which apparently games the "view more" mechanism.